Ran across this forum when I found a post from 2012 about the possibility of porting FLTK to Haiku. Was wondering if anyone got anywhere on the project. I’ve been looking at some of the different ways to run FLTK 1.3.2. It can be built without X using nano-X. There’s a DirectFB port of an older version (borrows some ideas from nano-X). Someone mentioned a Symbian port in the other thread.
If there was some type of lightweight library that provided some of the basic X11 functionality on top of something like SDL might be much easier to port projects like FLTK. nano-x has nxlib to provide most of the Xlib compatibility. Was recently talking to another developer who mentioned sdl2tk has some X11 compatibility functions. Was curious if anyone besides me would be interested in a project like this.
I also remember coming across a post about webm-player for Haiku and using it to provide a lightweight webm viewer. Looks like a really nice option for webm playback, but it doesn’t have any sound support built in. Was curious if anyone had looked into adding sound support to the code or found another lightweight (preferably SDL based) webm player. Also, if anyone’s interested there’s a lightweight theora player at the icculus site and a lightweight flx/flc player at the libsdl site.
Basically no… that said FTLK has abstractions for other OSes already. One just needs to be added for the BeAPI.
FTLK supports windows and cocoa natively in addition to X11.
Also the browser on Haiku now has html5… which would be the ideal thing to play webm. Streaming support is still in progress though at this time as it currently has to buffer a bit before it begins playback.
Please, don’t. Just don’t. The last thing Haiku needs is another alternative framework to draw developer attention away from the native API.
QT was supposed to bring salvation and what did it end us up with? A bunch of scattered, buggy ports that rarely get updated because the QT porters are already porting the next big thing. Half of them can’t even be bothered to stick an icon onto their port, so rushed are they. Now bring in a bunch of FLTK ports and I really see no reason to run Haiku anymore. My desktop will look as scattered and disjointed as my Linux box and in any case I can run all those QT and FLTK apps on my Linux box in the first place. Why bother with Haiku if none of your apps actually make use of its special benefits?
What Haiku needs desperately is for more languages to get hooks into the native API. Right now your choices are C++ and yab. We need a wider range of tools. A working FPC + Lazarus, a Python and Bethon setup out of the box, the Lua API Darkwyrm was working on some time back IIRC, all of those.
FLTK isn’t going to distract anyone anyway… :P. That said I think it would be nice to have. Some applications use it for launchers like FlightGear for instance and it would be pointless to write another one in the BeAPI.
If you are going to write a new app there is no reason to prefer FLTK over the BeAPI uness you want to write once and run on many OSes. FLTK is highly portable… I’ve compiled even the latest code on ECGS which was an early fork of Gcc from the 90’s on a Sun Ultra 1 and it worked fine and it is usually statically linked so you don’t have to worry about the FLTK library being installed… but really that is all it has going for it.
That says more about the lazy ass / amateur “porters”, less about the Qt itself. Also, nice good ole isolationism there, go ahead if you want Haiku to stay useless without any modern software, even for the majority of potential 3rd party devs that is a problem.